wordpress

📅 Daily Note: October 10, 2025

I newslettered earlier.

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i’ve been enjoying Lloyd’s recent ponderings about blogging.

I’m also really enjoying the way this blog works these days, posting little nuggets that can get pulled into a aggregated post on a daily basis (or when I remember to hit the switch). Each of these ‘microposts’ exists as a separate item in the database, so you could see them all in one place, or even subscribe to the RSS feed for them. Massive thanks again to Steph for making this magic work for me.

I am aware that it’s very link-heavy, and I don’t write much here other than pointing to other people’s stuff. I’d like to write more and reading Lloyd’s stuff has been encouraging!

All this is possible because of open platforms like WordPress and standards like RSS. I don’t really understand what the ‘fediverse’ is, really, but it strikes me that there are two simple things that people need: somewhere to write, and somewhere to read.

I wonder if thing that blogging lacks is what we get with a lot of the walled gardens, which is the that the reading and the writing is in the same place. People like me are happy finding one service to subscribe to blogs in, and another to write posts in. But should WordPress (say) have an inbuilt aggregator? After all, we don’t read and write emails in different apps.

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This blog now has a ‘dark mode’ option – there should be a moon shaped button floating around somewhere on the screen that lets you toggle between the default, rather bright, style; and a much darker, easier on the eyes one.

Very easy to do thanks this WordPress plugin.

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Not come across Digital and Data essentials for senior civil servants before, but it looks a sensible list, and one that could be easily adapted for local government use.

Perhaps as a Skillstats thing? 🤔

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Our daughter Jade took a photo of me to start using on the internet – replacing the rather catfishy one where I have hair and look hopeful. Have spent part of the day updating various accounts and web pages with it.

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Great stuff from Emily Webber on ice breakers.

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📅 Daily Note: September 30, 2025

Ouch: Europe’s largest city council delays fix to disastrous Oracle system once more:

Elected representatives of Birmingham City Council’s audit committee vented their frustration this week after hearing that the rollout of the IMS – designed to replace the council’s banking reconciliation system (BRS), which went so badly wrong after the April 2022 go-live of Oracle Fusion – is to be postponed again.

The council’s financial management has been unable to file auditable accounts since it replaced an aging – but functioning – SAP system with new cloud-based software from Oracle. Although the council had expected to implement the system out-of-the-box, it made customized modifications including the introduction of the BRS, which failed to function as planned. The council was declared effectively bankrupt in September 2023, because of the ERP disaster and outstanding equal pay claims. It is now working to reimplement Oracle from scratch and go live in April next year.

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A podcast episode featuring Dave Winer on “Decentralisation, WordPress and Open Publishing”:

Today we’re talking about the vision, history, and future of the open web. Dave reminisces about the origins of today’s internet, the early days when idealism and collaboration were at the web’s core. He shares stories from his career, the rise and fall of early software startups, and how the initial spirit of community slowly gave way to the “walled gardens” of big tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

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Now this looks interesting! Telex Turns Everyone into a WordPress Block Developer:

Telex is an experimental tool from the Automattic AI team that turns natural-language prompts into working WordPress blocks. You simply describe what you want, and Telex generates the block.

Telex is free to try out.

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Harry Metcalfe writes All policy constrains good action, as well as bad:

Like Shadow IT, pulling what’s currently done in the shadows into the light would teach us a lot about how teams work, what they need, and how we as organisations and leaders can enable them better.

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Lloyd Davis:

And I imagine that there are people who are still working like this, blogging regularly, having creative conversations in the fediverse and using all of that learning and knowledge-sharing to create new things, have new thoughts and find people to collaborate IRL.

But many of the people around me have walked away from writing in public – I have too, it’s hard to write this post without second guessing the responses. But to not write in public feels like a really sad resignation and failure. It feels like letting the bad guys win, and since a lot of bad guys seem to be winning quite often these days, I’m still tempted to believe that there’s a responsibility to put away the closed platforms and only do things that are on the web and controlled by me and to help the people in my communities to do the same.

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Richard Pope writes What the NHS Single Patient Record can learn from India’s Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission:

Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which provides open protocols for linking medical records, making bookings and managing consent; and the ABHA App which lets patients maintain a copy of their health records, access services and manage consent.

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📅 Daily Note: September 23, 2025

Building understanding of software markets in local government from the Local Digital team:

We’ve also identified through roundtable discussions and feedback from partners that managing effective procurements and successfully exiting technology contracts is a challenge, particularly where internal capacity or capability is limited.

With local government reorganisation, new unitary authorities will need to consolidate systems, migrate data, and harmonise business processes at an unprecedented scale. This will also impact technology contracts and procurement activities.

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Foundational Specification to support the procurement of social care Case Management Systems:

The Department of Health and Social Care has released a Foundational Specification to support the procurement of social care Case Management Systems (CMSs). Developed in partnership with BetterGov, the Specification is the outcome of a multi-stage consultation process involving a wide range of stakeholders. Its primary aim is to simplify the procurement journey for Local Authorities by providing a clear and consistent guide—helping to reduce the time, cost, and resources required when selecting new CMSs.

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Endel – via Matt Mullenweg – is an interesting idea, offering “[p]ersonalized soundscapes to help you focus, relax, and sleep. Backed by neuroscience.”

I definitely work better when I have the right music playing – but £60 is too steep when i already have Apple Music and a bunch of suitable playlists identified.

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Why WordPress Lost the Cool Kids (And How to Win Them Back):

Here’s what nobody talks about: WordPress is actually modern. REST API, GraphQL, headless implementations, React-based editing. It powers complex applications and handles millions of visitors. But everyone still thinks it’s “just for blogs.”

The platform regularly outperforms competitors on speed, but gets labeled as “slow and bloated.” Enterprise teams at Sony and Microsoft chose WordPress deliberately—these aren’t legacy installations.

WordPress has Full Site Editing and visual builders that compete with Webflow. They just feel hidden behind confusing historical interfaces.

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Another newsletter sent. Am pleased to be getting back into a fortnightly rhythm.

Some delivery issues though, need to have a look at my DNS records to ensure I have them set correctly.

If you’d like to sign up, you can do so!

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It isn’t altogether obvious how to send an email to the attendees of an upcoming Zoom meeting, without exporting their details and sending a normal email, which seems sub-optimal.

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Content Restrictor WordPress plugin

For a project, I needed a way to easily restrict access to content on a WordPress website on a per user basis.

There’s loads of existing plugins that over complicate this significantly, so I thought I would test Gemini‘s capability at writing WordPress code.

The result is Content Restrictor – and it works very nicely for my needs:

  • Pages and posts have a check box – should this be restricted or not?
  • Each user page now has a section with a list of all the restricted pages, and if checked, that user can view the content, else they get a message
  • The message can be customised in the settings
  • There’s also a short code to display all the restricted pages that the current user has access to
  • Admins accounts bypass the restrictions entirely

If it works for you tool, feel free to grab it from GitHub!

📅 Daily Note: December 12, 2024

It looks like – thanks to some heavy debugging and re-developing from Steph – the new way of creating the Daily Notes is working! I’ll write up the thinking about it and how it works shortly.

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One issue with my new blogging workflow is its dependence on a WordPress custom post type – and my editor of choice, MarsEdit, doesn’t currently talk to such things.

So, am testing a bit of code to get around this. In effect, I send a ‘normal’ post to WordPress from MarsEdit, only as a draft, and in a particular category.

When WordPress receives this, it spots it, copies the content and tags to a new micropost in the custom post type.

Currently the original post is left in drafts for me to delete manually, but I’ll probably automate that once I’m confident it’s working ok.

So, a bit janky and duplicative, but it ought to work ok. Will see if there’s any unforeseen repercussions on performance or anything like that. Code is on Github, if you’d like to make use of it.

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Jeremy’s 5 reflections on his year at Homes England are interesting, wise, and definitely worth thinking over.

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